Talent trees were fun when your goal was simply to have fun but when the developers announced a simpler talent tree I always wondered why they waited so long. In depth talent trees always just added more trouble on a development side than they were worth. Simpler talent trees across a class always made much more sense, MoP has done a good job with this and I hope they continue to make changes to make development easier in order to benefit overall time dedicated to game design. The more fun they can make this game the better IMO, they need to free up more resources from balance I hope they can do that properly without destroying this games depth.

This system was a lot more fun, I agree, but at the same time it created horrible balance issues. As fun as it was, there's no way to balance a million possible builds, it's much easier to balance a handful of skills.

I like actually having choices and swapping talents based on the fight or spec, instead of just looking up the cookie cutter and maybe being lucky enough to be able to move around 2-5 points to suit a fight. Plus you could change your talents easily.

While I do think that TBC was the best expansion so far, talents are much better now.

No more useless stuff like wand specialization, mandatory stuff like +hit/+spellpower talents, talents that reduce casting speed of spells that you always use (who in their right mind wouldn't select such talent?). There were always best talent trees with very minor variations that most players used. Those who didn't use those trees were nerfing themselves.

Talents aren't content. You set them once when level up, maybe change 1-2 times a month, but that's it. Before Ulduar patch (that brought double spec) players rarely changed talents.